RPGs

Having just finished Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook (which I discussed earlier here, and mentioned in passing here: it’s a big book, so I’d been reading it for a while now) I can say that big chunks of history suddenly make a lot more sense to me.

For one thing, the constant fascination with hidden treasure. Basically, a lot of people seemed to think of the world as if it were some kind of Monty Haul D&D campaign: at least in the English speaking world, the idea that there were hidden caches of treasure everywhere was bizarrely common,to the point where treasure hunting was a significant part of the work cunning folk did. This survives only in a couple of unusual forms at present: the idea of hidden pirate treasure is one form, tomb-robbing being another (think of the pyramids), and finally, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, hidden by a leprechaun.

Sounds like a quaint Irish myth, retooled to hawk kids’ cereal and cheesy musicals like Darby O’Gill and the Little People, right?

Well… the English had all kinds of stories about avaricious faeries and gnomes and spirits who’d hidden caches of gold all over the place, and were guarding them aggressively. (Sometimes, demons were even scripted into these tales as guardians.)

Map that onto the vast insanity of imperialist colonialism, and suddenly the hunt for El Dorado looks a little less bizarre, doesn’t it? It’s kind of a same-same-but-different sort of thing, straddling the old world class divide when there were anyway only two real classes: people with access to the royal court, and everyone else. Sir Walter Raleigh, for example, was really just doing what thousands of Englishmen did all the time: hunting for magically-hidden golden treasure, except on a much bigger, more elevated scale, and of course with much worse results all around.

(Another example is how upper class men complained to doctors of being stricken by love-sickness; as Mary Frances Wack notes, in her wonderful book on the medicalization of lovesickness, when lower-class men made the same sort of complaint, they were likelier to simply accuse a woman of having literally bewitched them, or of having stolen their penis by magical means, and be done with it.)

I suppose, in the end, this isn’t so surprising: after all, the proliferation of get-rich quick schemes in more recent history is sort of analogous to all of this. Gold is out there to be gotten… hell, one could argue it’s all part of the incorporation of capitalism into a precapitalist culture. It’s just funny how well-represented this is in popular culture, from computer games and the tabletop RPGs that inspired them, to films, pulp fiction, and so on. This idea is, in some ways, still with us… like so much of what’s in Baker’s book. It’s just well-hidden beneath a post-Enlightenment veneer.

The other interesting thing to note is that this was how a lot of people in the English-speaking world thought even into modern times. Baker’s book deals with history up to 1900 (he goes a little beyond that, in fact), and one of the most prominent examples of a person involved in cunning folk magic is the well-known Joseph Smith… yes, the founder of the Mormon religion. Those golden tablets covered in oriental writing, hidden in a cave? Yeah: typical cunning folk treasure narrative. He just rebranded it all. Smith and his family were steeped in cunning folk magic. Smith just had the clever idea to rebrand it at as a form of alternative Christianity… which is interesting since, if you read Baker’s book all the way through, you’ll see isn’t all that far from cunning folk magic anyway: most of the rituals and spells involved invocations of God, angels, and so on.

Which is to say, if history were a great big AD&D game, all the magic user spells would actually be a certain sub-branch of Christian clerical spells, and the treasure would be ridiculously plentiful… at least in everyone’s minds. Besides all that, you might think that an AD&D game set in our world would be short of supernatural enemies to throw in, but if you assumed that all the ones in people’s imaginations were real? Not so hard, really: there are tons of faerie races, demons and devils, angels, spirits, and so on.

The book is, however, massive. If I were not planning to move in a few weeks (!) I would likely have gone about reading it at a more leisurely pace. Baker excerpts generously, which means that there’s significant chunks of representative texts throughout. Not all of it is in modern English, so sometimes there’s a bit of a slog here and there, which is good in a way, since after all grimoire-reading is supposed to be a slog at times… but that kind of thing is better read at a leisurely pace, with breaks and breathing room.

No matter: I’ll be coming back to it in the future, and even with this caveat–it’s not a complaint, because I think it’s a positive feature in the book, as long as you’re not trying to devour it: it’s basically what allows Baker’s text to be so thorough and so convincing in terms of his arguments against the historicity of modern occultist wicca, and for a more fascinating tradition of cunning folk magic–I’m very glad I read it. It’s a real, ahem… treasure:

Oh, one more thing: the section on dreams was fascinating in part because I mentioned some of the funnier dream interpretations to my wife and a friend of ours who was visiting from Korea. What I found fascinating was how often the Korean interpretation of a typical dream fit well withthe archaic English interpretations in Baker’s book. The most surprising was the dream when your teeth all fall out, which is supposed to signal a death in the family; in Korea, apparently, there’s a very similar interpretation attached to this type of dream, which is funny considering how different the cultures are. I wonder whether that particular interpretation predates the arrival of Westerners in Korea… I imagine it does, but who knows?

I’ve posted before here about using RPGs as a learning tool with students. One of the things that’s important when you do this is to (a) choose a story structure that emphasizes communicative tasks: your students should have to talk a lot, whereas combat is something they want to avoid, or something that must be coordinated when it’s absolutely necessary.

That is to say, pedagogically, it’s better for students to end up having to negotiate treaties or beg for their lives than it is to have them running around doing hack’n’slash adventuring, or dungeoneering of the type epitomized in the phrase, “kick in the door, smash the monsters, grab the loot.” You probably do need to include combat once in a while–and the kids really do enjoy it more, the more occasional it is–but something closer to “Deep Immersion Storytelling”mode (as described here) is more effective.

The problem, of course, is that some kids are conditioned by computer games to see all gaming of any kind as basically an opportunity to fight, fight, fight, kill, kill, kill. While I disagree with the idea common among their moms that video games lead to violence or derangement, I do think that playing games that feature, almost exclusively, fights to the death (often as the sole form of conflict resolution), tends to condition kids to equate conflict in games with combat only. They have a vocabulary for that kind of resolution, gleaned from whatever games they are playing, for example.

Korean schoolboys these days seem to mostly be mired in League of Legends territory, for example, and they all seem to know and use phrases from the game, like these:

In fact, one of the things I’ve been struggling to get these kids’ moms to understand is that not all games involve killing killing killing. They don’t seem to believe me that there are games with interesting puzzles, problem solving tasks, or even language tasks. Part of the reason is that kids are all playing the free games, and the free games are often kill kill kill. You can tell a mom, “Well, yes, but look at this wonderful, amazing game that doesn’t involve any killing! And it’s only $10!” they kind of default to: “Games? Paying, to play a game? Meh, I’ll just ban games in the house and make my son study instead!”

Yeah, like that’s gonna work.

Anyway, beyond all that, I’ve still made some inroads with some kids, though I’ve gotten more selective in who I used games with, and how much. The RPG portion of any lesson is always a supplement, either to generate more material for homework tasks, or to give the kid a context to practice language structures in a way more interesting than a simple a drill.

Lately, there have been a few interesting examples I’ve tried with my students. Continue reading →

For the last few days, I’ve been taking medicine for an ear infection I suddenly developed. It’s not completely clear what caused the infection: contamination of the water in the pool where I swim is possible, but it’s just as likely that it’s a side effect of a particular asthma medication I’ve been taking. In any case, it’s not completely resolved, but it is a lot better than it was… yesterday, I was worried my eardrum might burst from the pressure, but today it’s almost normal again. (On the one side, at least.)

Anyway, as a result, I’ve been unable to practice saxophone or swim since last Thursday. I’ve gotten a fair bit of writing done, but like anyone who suddenly finds themselves ill, I did a fair bit of lying there, doing by best to try ignore the terrifyingly mounting pain in my middle ear, and relying on movies for distraction.

Which movies? Well, I’ve started tracking films I’ve watched over on LetterBoxD, for now, with short reviews. I like the interface and like the challenge of trying to write up little capsule reviews of what I thought about each film. If I find myself simply logging films watched I may not continue, but it’s the film-tracking social site I like best at the moment; my only wish is that poster images for the films would embed in the RSS feed that I’m mirroring in the sidebar here. (Way down near the bottom of the sidebar.)

But I’ve focused on horror movies, since Mrs. Jiwaku doesn’t like watching those too often, and–driven by recently reading some of Thomas Ligotti’s work–because I’m kind of trying to solidify (and answer) some questions in my own mind… about enigma.

Update: One of the points below was unfinished. I was actually planning on splitting this post into two parts, but I guess I left it scheduled and it got posted while I was doing other things. It’s been linked a few times, so… I’ll leave it as it is.Except I went ahead and finished that point.

ORIGINAL Post: So: what did I learn from RPGing, and specifically from GMing? This is the last post in the projected series (though who knows, there may be more to say…)

I think I should put this into two categories: stuff I learned that applies to my life, and stuff I learned that applies to writing. If you’re a writer, it may be of use. If you’re a living person, maybe less so, though if you’re a gamer, it might resonate. Gamers and writers, I guess. And those curious. Continue reading →

Having discussed those times when I gamed with other people in live RPGing situations, I figured I might as well also talk about my limited experience with PBeM RPG gaming. That is, Play By e-Mail. It’s an offshoot of the older PBM gaming that developed before the internet, but I never played that. My first experience with remote gaming was online.

At some point during my first three or four months of using the Internet–which puts this back in 1995, I think–I discovered the website Mormegil’s Scrollworks (now defunct, do it’s a dead link) run by Christian Walker, a wonderful guy with whom I struck up my first online friendship, and who went on to found the Scrollworks RPG zine. Christian ran a PBeM RPg game with my ex and me for a while.

Her character was a young child, if I remember right, and mine was a mentally unstable goblin mage, except of course goblins aren’t smart enough to learn magic, so he was just a zero-level goblin moron. He believed that his power came from tubers growing in his garden, and always carried around a rutabaga, I think it was; the poor fellow proudly presented to everyone he met a scroll that he believed was the title deed to some famous magical grove in a nearby forest. (He’d bought it from a passing warrior, and in fact the scroll said, “I am too stupid to live. Please kill me.” Somehow, nobody ever did it, though; they probably felt sorry for a helpless, stupid goblin who believed he was destined to be the world’s next great “Ark-Mage.”) Christian was a kind a patient GM with a greaty sense of humor, and we had a lot of fun for the short while the game lasted. (I’m not sure what caused it to fizzle: Christian got married at some point, but I also was studying music composition and it was a pretty all-encompassing thing at many times.)

I returned to PBeM once more, this time as a GM, sometime during my studies at graduate school in Montreal. This was in my second year in the city, 1999-2000, I think. I remember clearly working on the game at my apartment on Rue Hutchison — in fact, typing up the collated weekly game turn for my subgroup of characters on my PowerMac while listening to Bjork’s “Pluto” on a loop.

This game was called “Stellar Region” and I co-ran with my friend Kat Feete. Kat was a lifelong gamer, and an aspiring SF author as well, and we met on the Brin-L, a mailing list that was ostensibly full of David Brin fans discussing his works, but ended up being full of all kinds of SF fans discussing all kinds of things except Brin’s work, until… well, I won’t talk about that, except to say a lot of us transferred over to the Iain M. Banks mailing list (The Culture List) around the time of Stellar Region. Kat and I recruited players from the Brin-L, and then ran what ended up being a somewhat literary PBeM.

Not literary in the sense of James Joyce, mind, but, it was a weekly exercise in fiction writing. Players would have a chance to hold dialog during the week, to which we would respond when we could, usually within a day or two. Usually, things would jumble together, actions colliding and clashing, and Kat and I would not only report dialog as it took place, but also do the choreography that involved characters and their actions running into one another. Then the cycle would begin again.

I think Kat and I actually began worldbuilding on Stellar Region quite some time before we actually launched the game. There were a number of player character races, one of them cribbed from my friend Karen Smith’s writing (a furry humanoid from an ice planet, called the Ktiath), another species designed by Kat which was basically a ripoff of that humanlike alien at the beginning of the original Men in Black movie, and the others Kat and I made up ourselves. There were about five major humanoid species, plus one or two of what we’d now call post-Singulatarian species, one of which were called, I think, the “Atheri,” who putt-putted around the galaxy on slow, impossible-to-board ships.

There were all kinds of neat GM secrets that Kat and I thought up, too: secret backstories about both of the major alien species (yes, an intertwined history with a war and an uprising, and genetic tinkering related to all those humanoid player-character species); weird locales, like one planet that was itself a Big Dumb Object (the intelligent species that had created it had retreated into a nanotech-fueled solipsism, which they emulated from the safety of nano-networks housed in the nervous systems of the major species living on the planet); and of course local politics among one group of characters who were on a human colony planet.

We started the game out with two groups of characters, on different worlds. They were supposed to end up being joined at some point, but gameplay was so slow that this never happened. I don’t remember how long we ran “Stellar Regions,” but I do know that it was incredibly time-consuming, which was the reason, finally, we quit running it.

And yes, I was the one who named Stellar Region, specifically after the Stellar Regions album by John Coltrane. There was no connection, other than the CD happened to be on my desk when I was trying to think up a name for the game setting, and the name sounded cool.

I’m sure I have archives of the original game setting stuff somewhere, on some CD-ROM or something. If I find it, I’ll post the archive for anyone interested. Heck, if I have the email archives too, I may even throw them in, so that any interested individual could snag a few GM secrets for gameplay… or former players can see a little bit past the veil behind which Kat and I ran the game. Not that I imagine many of them will go out looking for anything on “Stellar Regions” after so long. I suspect most players were a big disappointed at how slowly gameplay progressed, and at how abruptly it tapered out. By the end, I was exhausted–and I suspect that was how it was for Kat, too.

Still, PBeM was fun at the time, but I found it lacked something integral to the RPGing experience–the interaction and spontaneity so central to pen-and-paper RPG gaming. I don’t regret the experience, and I learned things from both games.

And in my next post in this series, I’ll turn to that theme: what I learned from RPG gaming in general.